Metro Browser

I’ve been impressed with the browser so far. The quality of the content rendering and compatibility is good, it’s fast, it’s fluid and it’s clutter-free. There are issues though and I’ve listed some of them below. Cut and paste seems to work well with the finger, accessing tabs via the pulldown-menu is intuitive and I’ve even been happy using Bing as a search engine. I am even detecting that the Metro Explorer gets suspended when the desktop is being used. I love the ability to re-open the URL in a desktop browser if needed.

Issues

Sharing subsystem can’t really be checked fully as applications are rather basic right now.

Flash not supported.

Here’s a video demo of the Metro browser focusing on what I’ve mentioned above.

No start menu!

This is going to be a tough one for people to get immediately comfortable with but after a while I’ve managed to view the Metro UI as not only a widget and Metro application pane but also as a start menu. By pinning your required applications to the Metro UI, you can access them easily. Searching for apps is also quick. You can seee an example of applications pinned to the Metro UI to the left. (You do this by search for the app, right-clicking and selecting ‘pin’)

Windows 8 Core, and Mobility

Moving on the the Windows 8 core then it’s encouraging to see it controlling the PC for better energy efficiency than Windows 7. There could be a number of optimisations involved here but the net result is that Windows 8 allows a PC to idle to a lower point, more quickly. On the Atom-based Fujitsu U820 I tested, I’m seeing an estimated 20% lower idle drain rate. If you consider the idle capabilities of the newer Intel platforms, it’s going to be even better. Ultrabooks are likely to idle very well too because of their tight designs.

It’s a shame we can’t work with an idle PC though ; ‘getting things done’ means screen-on, Wi-Fi on, USB, busses active, CPU and GPU all working to keep up with our demands and this is where ARM may have a little problem. In an active state like this, the CPU accounts for a small portion of the battery drain, about 20-30% on a X86 PC so the importance of getting a processing job done as quickly as possible in order to let everything else idle down can not be understated. [Look-up ‘HUGI and check this article out for more details.] Simply put, you do not want a slow CPU on a peripheral-loaded computing platform.

It turns out that Windows 8 is fairly resource heavy. This is the developer preview we’re looking at but I’ve been testing in 1GB of RAM and it’s clear to see that 2GB is going to reduce a lot of bottlenecks and improve efficiency. 4GB is needed for major application work and at that point you get into the 64bit requirement too. Windows 8 is not targeted at mobile in this respect. How about that 6GB-9GB install space requirement! That means expensive 32GB SSDs as a minimum.These peripheral costs mount up and leave mobile operating systems with the advantage.

Fast-start through the newly designed hibernation system is going to help and we’re probably going to get to a point, finally, where we can say that standby is reliable enough that the user doesn’t really need to use the power button any more to shut the PC down.

[Note: I haven’t tested pen input or sensor support and the app store is not available for testing yet.]

Summary

I know many people out there are not interested in Windows 7 on a mobile device but the fact is (was?) that Windows 8 has (had?) potential to be the first high-dynamic range desktop operating system that could cross-over to handheld PC’s. It looks like that its not going to be the case. Not only do I think that Windows 8 won’t usher in a new wave of handheld productivity devices but seeing the build in action and seeing the target use-cases I’m certain that Windows 8 will require large screens and powerful processors. It’s going to be an easy win for X86 against ARM for the next 2-3 years.

I’m continuing my testing with an ExoPC and note that if you’re in Europe, the WeTab, a Meego version of the ExoPC hardware is available in a few places for a really cheap price right now. Its not a mobile tablet but it’s solid, has a 1366×768 screen and is probably the cheapest way to give Metro a test for touch usability. Good for developers too!

Have you been testing?

What do you think of Windows 8 in relation to mobile and handheld devices. Did Microsoft just make an operating system with a finger-focused, tablet UI that can’t be used on handheld devices?

22 Comments For This Post

Chippy, like MS you’re thinking in the way of the old. If MS had designed the UI properly there should be absolutely NO readability issues of high PPI small screens. But instead MS has decided to design W8 in the same way as previous Windows, 1:1 pixel dependence. For people who don’t understand, a simple example would be to take the same size screen with 2 different resolutions. On the screen with the higher resolution everything will be smaller but more information will fit.

If people wan’t to see the proper way of designing a UI, although not perfect, Android does a remarkable job of eliminating hard-coded pixel dependence & instead relying on PPI. This is why you can have 4″-ish Android devices with resolutions from 800×480, 960×540, 1280×720, etc & they will fit almost the exact same amount of information on the screen (everything will just be alot sharper with higher resolutions). In the world of Windows, higher resolutions would simply shrink everything down.

While I think W8 is interesting, let’s face it, tiles are nothing more than square widgets. MS is a company that is simply out of idea’s & is hopelessly stuck in legacy engineering. They have lost all their top talent to Google, Apple, & Facebook, new college grad’s don’t even want to work there anymore. They are a company trending downwards & will never recover. I know some people from Intel/MS read these blogs & know exactly what I’m talking about.

It took Honeycomb before they natively supported larger resolutions and still it’ll be ICS that addresses most of the remaining resolution issues. While in the meantime they still depend on the apps being made to allow for a range of resolutions otherwise they look terrible or won’t work on larger screen resolutions.

Never mind both you and Chippy are basing your opinions on the developer’s preview release, which is little more than Windows 7 with a preliminary version of Metro thrown on top of it.

They got about 300 changes they are going to make to it before they even put out the release candidate version.

While many users are already making it known what they like and don’t like with Metro and that’s likely to effect the final release version. While features like DPI auto scaling were already planned for it.

It doesnt matter if it’s only the preview, this is not something MS can change easily. Besides they won’t, just like they never changed the file system. Denying MS legacy roots is ridiculous, they use old tech with new icing.

I don’t think PPI is an issue for the software at all. I’ve re-read my article. maybe I didn’t make it clear enough so it’s my fault, sorry.

High PPI isn’t a problem for the software. I expect Metro UI to scale and WIndows desktop always has the manual adjustments. (Although some software doesn’t play nicely when font DPI is adjusted)

High PPI is a problem in three ways.
1 – Cost of production
2 – Cost of graphics energy needed to drive the screen.
3 – Unneccesary in many cases. 200 PPI is approx retina anglular limit at 45 cm and most people are happy with less.

“200 PPI is approx retina anglular limit at 45 cm”, it is only suitable for some of the extremely good eyesight of youths, (ONLY during the 17-20 age). If you were myopia eye or non-youths age, your eyes resolution are less than 200 dpi/45 cm.

We need to see better colour in the tablet and notebook, as well as usability in outdoors daytime, but is not fanatical to increase the PPI. Here does not talk about the cellphone screen, 3-inch or 4-inch merely.

Hope we’ll get good explanations about the resolution limit, because it seems very silly right now. They better require min PPI and min screen size. Resolution is going through the roof recently, so it’s not meaningful.

I have a good eye sight, and also noticed ~200 PPI is the max resolution for meaningful pixels. A desktop “pixel efficient font” on a handled is readable but tiring in the long run, way smaller than paperback print size.
It’s usually used in terminals and command line stuff where I want to fit as much information as possible.

So, at 200PPI usual paperback “small but comfortable” characters can be pretty anti-aliased ones. It’s usually better for longer sessions of reading.

Over 200PPI can be nice for people to not see pixels on aliased stuff, but that’s all…

I did those rough measurements a while ago, but I still wonder if there are some CPI (characters per inch) standards.

It could be a 1,000,000,000 ppi & should not matter as long as text is set to ppi scaling based on real world deminsions. Small pixels dont have to mean small everyting unless the OS doesnt know what its doing.

BTW, I do gfx work for a living & have been dealing with these issues forever. expect a 4x jump in small screen resolutions within the next few years. Whats Metro UI going to do, just make everything smaller, on a touch screen? Oh wait no they wont, instead MS will prevent vendors from using hi rez screens just like they do now with WP7 while Android continues to explode.

We agree, MS should issue some screen size limits (so their UI works), not resolution limits. And let things scale if needed.

Most of my rant is some comparisons to show that PPI are becoming crazy high recently. I like better a handled with a useful screen (cheaper and less power hungry) than having my 12″ laptop resolution in a 4″ device, even if things scale.

Steve, it’s very early to say that Windows 8 is not designed to be used in Portrait Mode. This is not even an Apha Version and many things have not been implemented yet. Thing like Portrait Mode, Rotation, etc, will come later when Manufacurers and Microsoft work in these points. Without the proper driver support these things are impossible. Keep that in mind.

FB is 1 of the few people I have ever seen actually understand PPI based scaling. With all due respect Chippy, the examples you’re giving are based completely in the past on how Windows PC’s handle pixels. High PPI screens should never make reading difficult. In fact if things scale properly it should make things better as text will be much more sharp. If the physical world object size stays the same, more pixels rendering the object will ALWAYS make it look better.

To be fair MS is not the only 1, Apple does this as well with iOS but in an even worse way. Although the difference is Apple also controls the hardware which helps ensure that there won’t be any non-compliant screen resolutions to break the experience. Of course now we see MS doing the samething with WP7 (controlling the hardware). Is MS going to do this as well with W8? They have already admitted that Metro apps will be forced through the store. It’s quite sad to see a company like MS have nothing left in them but to copy Apple’s closed system policies. It’s as if they forgot their entire advantage was letting users do whatever they want. Has emulating others policies ever been financially successful for MS (X-Box, Zune, WP7)? Nope.

Android is not perfect & has had ALOT of growing pains. But Google knew they would never be able to control what hardware makers did with an open-source OS so they decided to make Android independent from any particular SoC or resolution (generally speaking). Without question, Google has by far done the best job of future-proofing their OS. This is why going forward all the latest tech (SoC’s, screen resolutions, etc) will be on Android devices 1st & take years (if ever) for Apple/MS to implement. It’s already happened with dual-core (soon quad-core) & is about to happen with resolutions in the Nexus Prime 1280×720.

See my response up top to FirnBirn. The PPI problems I see have nothing to do with scaling. I’m totally happy that Metro and Windows desktop will work with high PPI. I used 200-250ppi devices for many years with Windows !

DO we all agree that high PPI screens are still restrictive for the reasons I gave above though. Over time, 200 dpi on a handheld will be common (i’m looking at the Huawei Mediapad 200ppi device as a next purchase!) and 300+ will be top-end. Perhaps Microsoft have taken this into consideration with their product.

Regards and thanks for the comments – exactly what I wanted to see here.

That’s with using a mouse-cursor which happens to have precise 1×1 pixel accuracy. High PPI matters alot when “touching” Windows with fat fingers IF Windows keeps the same legacy scaling techniques (high PPI = small UI elements).

My guess? MS won’t do a damn thing about making resolution independence & instead just make hardware vendors limit their resolutions. Bad bad idea since I have recently played with a 2048×1536 10″ device. You will see it & it’s widescreen variants starting next year in mobile devices.

300 – 350 PPI is about the maximum the human eye can differentiate from any distance. Yes of course that’s highly debatable but around that point it becomes somewhat pointless to make anything higher (digital picture PPI is the exception but that’s for an entirely different purpose).

It’s a great topic Chippy & I’m glad to see it being discussed. Your other con’s like cost, energy consumption, are very true.

“300 â€“ 350 PPI is about the maximum the human eye can differentiate from any distance”.

1. must be a youth at 20 years old , not 10 years old or 40 years old,
2. a youth of twenty has the best eyesight, not myopia eye,
3. the target spacing is only with 30cm from the eyes. ( not 45cm or far).

other replies are as follows,

Chippy Replied
October 15th, 2011 at 9:49 pm
High PPI is a problem in three ways.
1 â€“ Cost of production
2 â€“ Cost of graphics energy needed to drive the screen.
3 â€“ Unneccesary in many cases. 200 PPI is approx retina anglular limit at 45 cm and most people are happy with less.

timon Replied:
October 16th, 2011 at 5:44 am
â€œ200 PPI is approx retina anglular limit at 45 cmâ€, it is only suitable for some of the extremely good eyesight of youths, (ONLY during the 17-20 age). If you were myopia eye or non-youths age, your eyes resolution are less than 200 dpi/45 cm.

We need to see better colour in the tablet and notebook, as well as usability in outdoors daytime, but is not fanatical to increase the PPI. Here does not talk about the cellphone screen, 3-inch or 4-inch merely.